The Core

If you're a podcast listener, try to find an interview with Balaji Srinivasam. He was CTO of Coinbase and previously was founder of some startup that he sold to Coinbase. Interesting perspectives. He's an evangelist, but an interesting one. He recently did a mega interview with Tim Ferriss (over three hours, but nevertheless dense) and a more digestible but less interesting interview on What Bitcoin Did.

Anyway, he is really trying to get India to go big on crypto. His stance is that India, Russia and Iran can and should throw in with Bitcoin, rather than their own coin. But the interesting part of his argument is that right now most of the economy uses the dollar as a money of account (oil first and foremost, but other goods too). This opens countries like Russia and Iran to sanctions, but it makes other countries beholden to the US. China is trying to get the world to switch to the yuan and could succeed.

But it's clear that the world is not switching to the rupee, the ruble or the rial. So while China can break away from US currency domination and maybe even Europe could try, nobody else is even close. So tripling down on crypto would be the path forward.

It took me a week to listen to the whole thing off and on. Still, I would say that despite the length, the density of ideas is high. In fact, I briefly considered just starting it over again. I think some of his stuff is off base, but even those observations are thought-provoking.

My wife was more skeptical than me, but had the same reaction - surprised to make it all the way through, but then feeling like it might be worth a second listen.

I guess it depends on how much you know about the topics. For us, on the subject of crypto, the answer was, "close to nothing." So if you're better-informed, it will no doubt be less thought-provoking.

The one-hour version on "What Bitcoin Did" is more focused, but less interesting. But for the specific topic that started the thread, has the kernel of it.